 |
|
DEREK SMITH
I have been submitting pieces to the Workshop Anthology since 1989. Always short stories. Well the end of a millennium and an eclipse year is good a time for poetry. So this year I shall be a poet. These are pieces I wrote in the last twelve months.
BEANS MEANZ!
Shelves high
Mountains high
Reddish brown
In reddish brown sauce
Turquoise wrapping
Blue, red
Heinz
Crosse & Blackwell
Own brand
Singles, doubles, fours -
Great cans
Bulging like Popeye’s muscles
Somewhere
From a vat
Beans pour like a flood
Off a mountain
Somewhere
A cannery
An infantry of automata
Shunted
Under jets of sludge
Somewhere
Under cloudless skies
A tractor the size of a truck
Sprays thin fountains
In birdless fields
A woman with a child
A stick
In a sticky mouth
Picks up a four-pack
Believing
God is here
With loaves and fishes
And points cards
A young man
Grabs a can
Soon a spoon
Stuffs beans
Into lusty jeans
IN THE PRE-CAMBRIAN
In the Pre-Cambrian I am blue,
Aren’t you?
In the Cambrian I am a cluster,
Hardly passing muster.
In the Ordovician I get my backbone,
But not my phone.
In the Silurian I cross the seas,
As I please.
In the Devonian I crawl ashore,
There’s no law.
In the Carboniferous I breath tepid air,
Most unfair.
In the Permian I wade through mud,
Lose pints of blood
In the Triassic I become that big,
I sweat like a pig
In the Jurassic I lumber,
Snore when I slumber.
In the Cretaceous I grow annoyed,
Extinct by an asteroid.
SO
‘So’ she said
lips pressed tight
afraid to admit.
‘So,’ he said
pacing the floor
fingers clenched.
‘So,’ she sighed
closing her eyes
and sighed again.
‘So,’ he echoed
biting the word
that could fuel a flame.
So the silence
coated in lies
drenched in hate.
THE COTTAGE
I went up to the wooden door
And was about to hammer there
A howl inhuman cut the air
A cry of fearful dread and pain
The blood within me froze at once
I trembled with a terror dark
The door swung wide upon its hinge
As if it beckoned me inside
When footsteps sounded on the boards
I knew the dead had come for me
ACROSS THE SAND
Between the bones and cacti,
A torrent of heat,
Dazzles and burns.
A man trudges,
Body bare and peeling
Ankles of blood and grit,
Tongue thick as leather.
In shimmering air
A vulture hovers,
A snake slithers,
A lion snoozes,
A bi-plane drones,
A pilot in goggles
Aims a gun
Splattering the sand.
A man trudges
A plane circles
A vulture hovers
A lion snoozes.
Across the sand
Between the bones and cacti,
A torrent of heat,
Dazzles and burns.
|
|
|
|
|
